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Qaeda Operative Arrested in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An operative of Al Qaeda believed to be an American was arrested in the sprawling southern city of Karachi in recent days by Pakistani security officials, Pakistani officials said Sunday.

American and Pakistani officials said the man arrested was Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam, who was described as having been born in Pennsylvania and who was thought to be affiliated with the operations division of Al Qaeda, commanding fighters in Afghanistan.

One American official briefed on the arrest described the operative in custody as fair-skinned and someone who spoke both English and Pashto.

Little else was known about him, American officials said, and it was not immediately clear that American officials were involved in the arrest. There was no confirmation that the arrested man was in fact an American.

Senior administration officials said on Sunday that they did not believe the arrest was of Mr. Gadahn. For hours, information was difficult to confirm from Pakistan. President Obama was briefed on news reports of the arrest, but later learned they were most likely not correct.

Mr. Gadahn has been on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list since 2004 with a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture, and he is the first American to be charged with treason in more than half a century. He was believed to have been operating in the area of the Pakistani-Afghan border.

In a recent video, Mr. Gadahn urged Muslims to follow the example of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the American charged with the shooting that killed 13 people in Fort Hood, Tex., in November.

While the importance of the latest arrest was not clear, it builds on the capture of several senior Afghan Taliban leaders in recent weeks, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No. 2 official in the Afghan Taliban leadership.

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A senior Obama administration official in Washington said that Pakistani authorities had Mullah Baradar in custody and still allowed American interrogators to question him regularly.

“He’s talking to us but we’re still in the trust-building phase,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the interrogation results are confidential. “He’s not giving us any actionable intelligence.”

The official said that Pakistani authorities were likely to have more leverage over Mullah Baradar than American officials, because of the longstanding relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. American officials also assume that the ISI tends to some of Mullah Baradar’s family members.

The officials discounted the likelihood that Pakistani authorities were using harsh interrogation methods on Mullah Baradar. “They know what he knows,” the official said.

The arrest of Mullah Baradar and about a half-dozen other senior Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan in recent weeks have prompted some analysts to declare that the Pakistani intelligence service has committed itself to working against the Afghan Taliban, its longtime proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan. But the senior administration official voiced skepticism that there had been any strategic shift by the highest levels of the Pakistani spy agency.

“It’s still not clear what’s going on, but we haven’t concluded there’s some major shift,” the official said. “One theory is that this was a confluence of tactical operations.”

Another theory, he said, is that Mullah Baradar and the other captured Taliban leaders were purged by hard-liners in the Afghan Taliban leadership, who grew distrustful of them.

A Pakistani court ruled last month that Mullah Baradar could not be transferred to the Afghan government, despite efforts by the Afghans to seek his extradition. Moving Mullah Baradar or any other Taliban or Qaeda figure from Pakistani custody to Afghanistan would be tantamount to a transfer to the United States, American officials said.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2010, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Pakistani Authorities Arrest An Operative of Al Qaeda. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe